Cardiac SUrgeryAdvanceD Life Support

In 2003 there was a cardiac arrest on a patient 4 hours post cardiac surgery. Over the following four hours his chest was re-opened three times and eventually the patient was re-grafted in his ICU bed on bypass.

Many of the nursing and junior medical staff reported they felt disorganised and of little help to the situation and would have performed much better if they had a defined and well practised role. In response to this we created the Cardiac Surgery Advanced Life Support Course.

We have devised a set of protocols that address the patient suffering a cardiac arrest and all common serious complications in ICU or on the ward. Our aim was to create a common language for all cardiothoracic practitioners.

This protocol has grown and has been accepted as the European Association of Cardiothoracic Surgery's official protocol and has been accepted by the European Resuscitation Council. The Society of Thoracic Surgery also created an expert consensus statement which is published in the Annals of Thoracic surgery (Feb 2017) which sets these protocols as the standard of care in the USA.

We hope this course will empower all practitioners to act with confidence to better treat our critically ill patients using well validated protocols, safely managing the patient until expert help arrives..

RESUSCITATION TRAINING IN THE USA

The STS Expert Consensus Statement in Resuscitation After Cardiac Surgery now endorses the EACTS protocol, advocating that an emergency resternotomy be performed within 5 minutes if standard resuscitation strategies are unsuccessful. Training in this important new protocol is now widely available across the US. CSU-ALS North America (CSU-ALS.org) is a multidisciplinary organization of nurses, NP’s, PA’s, and surgeons that will lead this training in North America. If you would like more information, please fill in the contact form below or visit the USA website. ​

Courses

​You can now do the full CALS course online and receive certification. Simply go to this website to learn more and take the course